An AMD internal memos hows the AMD Phenom 9700, 2.4 GHz processor is slated for mid-December availability. Allocation for the Phenom 9600 running at 2.3GHz has been pushed back to a Q1 2008 date.

The Tech Report, in an interview with AMD's desktop product marketing manager Michael Saucier, confirmed an erratum for all Phenom processors that will cause the system to hang due to an L3 cache miss. The Tech Report claims this fix will degrade performance as much at 10%.

The mainboard favored by AMD, the MSI K9A2 Platinum is impossible to get currently since it is out of stock. MSI confirmed to DailyTech that this board will start shipping again next week, and that the board itself is not with any defect, but just in high demand and low availability.

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quote: Stability is an equally important axis in computer performance, and the story isn't particularly robust yet. Earlier, we noted the inability of the platform to run Adobe After Effects CS3. In our game testing, the Supreme Commander benchmark crashed several times, while Quake Wars: Enemy Territory locked up once. Thermal issues didn't seem to be the culprit here. It's very likely another BIOS update or two for the motherboard will be needed to fix these issues.

quote: The spider platform looks good overall if you ignore some bugs they have right now....the processor we did have had a number of issues that added up....AMD's Phenom Processor falls short of expectations and needs to have the bugs worked out with higher clock frequencies.

quote: AMD's plan to release an unlocked version of the Phenom 9600 may help tip the scales in the 9600's favor for some folks, but I suspect they won't find much overclocking headroom in those chips. In fact, our 2.6GHz engineering sample wasn't 100% stable, which is why you won't find any overclocking results in this review.

They had to stop shipping Barcelona because of it ... no tier 1 OEM has shipped one, not a single box, with a dual socket Barcey/Opteron quad.

quote: AMD's quad-core "Barcelona" Opterons have been notably difficult to find since their introduction two months ago, and The Tech Report has learned that a chip-level problem has impacted the supply of these chips to both server OEMs and distribution channel customers.

quote: If you call an OEM today to get an AMD quad-core powered system, you’relikely to get a pitch for an Intel system or an AMD dual-core chip. Why? Quad-core Opterons, those formerly known as Barcelona chips, are in short supply.

quote: "So overall I'm not at all disappointed by AMD Phenom at all. It's just that we were all expecting a little more." - guru3d.com

So, what he says is that a updated Phenom performs well, but the speed is behind, compared to Intel. But viewed by price/performance, Phenoms aren't that bad.

I'm confident that AMD will get the problems with Phenoms solved. Also needing motherboard BIOS updates incl. some new micro code. OK, the Phenoms gets slower (VERY bad indeed!) but at least it can run :-/

I referred to the DFI motherboard btw. regarding links, not the Phenom :)

But thanks for that comprehensive list anyway. Pretty much sums up the Phenoms 'phenomenon' :)

Well, I thought you were challenging the assertion that I stated it is a bit buggy.

I have not doubt these will iron out, but it has been a while since a major product launch where I have seen such a large number of 'stability is a problem' statements, not that it never happened... in those cases, I also recommend people to wait if asked.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007